My experience with The Sims franchise is similar. I pirated throughout the first and second versions because I couldn't afford it at the time but when I could I'd buy individual expansion packs etc when they were new because I wanted to support the game. When TS3 came out I got a legal copy, but by then EA had gone a little crazy with the DRM and the game constantly broke, telling me it wasn't a legit copy when it was. So I went back to pirating since it was too much of a hassle not to.